Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

"Wolf Lepenies has written a penetrating account of the role of Germany's self-image as the home of Kultur in that country's intellectual and political history. His range of reference is amazingly wide, and his writing is a delight. The Seduction of Culture in German History combines striking anecdotes, historical sweep, and incisive critical analysis."--Richard Rorty, Stanford University

"For anyone who has been astonished by the German obsession with high culture--even in economic hard times, Berlin has three opera houses--Wolf Lepenies's deeply intelligent book is indispensable reading. But The Seduction of Culture in German History is more than the history of a national obsession. It is a searching analysis of the ways in which culture can serve as a sinister substitute for ethical engagement in democratic politics. With his brilliant forays into the cultural history of America and France and his dazzling sweep from Bismarck to the present, Lepenies has written a book whose passionate commitment to participatory democracy is rendered the nobler by his sophisticated irony and urbanity."--Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University, author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

"The Seduction of Culture in German History is a powerful and sustained meditation on the dilemmas of Germany's legendary infatuation with Kultur. These themes have never been brought together so impressively and convincingly. This marvelous tour d'horizon of twentieth-century German intellectual life provocatively suggests that the central interpretive questions about the German past remain unsettled. Lepenies's prose is lively, witty, and engaging. Every paragraph is packed with dazzling insight. The writing is lapidary, the conclusions magisterial."--Richard Wolin, CUNY Graduate Center

"Wolf Lepenies has written a wonderfully erudite and thought-provoking book on that grand theme of German history since the eighteenth century: the immense value placed upon Kultur and the disparagement of politics. Lepenies accomplishes his task by taking the reader on a wide-ranging tour through the thought and biographies of many of the key figures of German, French, and American intellectual life. The problem he examines is a critical one for understanding Germany and the connections between it and the United States. The book is an intellectual tour de force written in a fluent and highly engaging style."--Eric D. Weitz, University of Minnesota

Review

"Lepenies's reflections on French-German and American-German culture wars suggest that cultural interpretation is as much a part of the social world as any social or political fact. . . . [H]is history of an idea . . . contains important political lessons for both Europe and the United States. The substitution of culture for politics is a dangerous road to travel."--Andreas Huyssen, The Nation

Review

"At times German cultural pride has become so obsessive that it's distorted the development of society. In an audacious new book, The Seduction of Culture in German History, . . . Wolf Lepenies blames the catastrophes of 20th-century German politics on a tendency to overrate culture at the expense of politics."--Robert Fulford, National Post

Review

"The Seduction of Culture in German History, by Wolf Lepenies, offers fresh insights into the causes of the Nazi lunacy. Erudite and richly detailed, it traces the pathology of nationalist and cultural fixations, with implications for our own nervous and jingoistic age."--Peter Rose, The Australian

Review

"A highly thought-provoking, if not contentious, series of 'history of ideas' vignettes. Lepenies traces the evolution of the Kulturnation, a nation united by culture rather than by political institutions, from the 18th century, when it emerged in the absence of a central German state, until German reunification in 1990. . . . Lepenies concludes with a cautiously optimistic view of Germans' reconciliation of culture and politics. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice

Review

"[Lepenies] gives a thorough treatment of the culture wars between France and Germany, émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the role culture played behind the Iron Curtain, and how the intellectuals triumphed over the communists throughout much of Eastern Europe but not in the German Democratic Republic . . .. Lepenies excels . . . in his examination of German society and its embrace of culture while shunning politics."--Victorino Matus, First Things

Review

"Wolf Lepenies, one of Germany's foremost public intellectuals, has written a fascinating and chilling essay on the seemingly unshakable German attitude of valuing culture over politics. . . . [T]he role or cultural trends as powerful agents still needs to be seriously addressed. Lepenies's book does just this."--Anna B. Manchin, H-Net Review

Review

"[T]he eleven chapters/essays read most like a sophisticated and stimulating after-dinner conversation with much wit and many a dazzling insight and bon mot."--Diethelm Prowe, Historian

Review

"It is . . . one of Lepenies' achievements to be able to combine irony and engagement. . . . [T]here is a refreshing combination of restrained detachment with an unambiguous commitment to the ideal of a free society."--Beatrice Puja, European Legacy

Synopsis

During the Allied bombing of Germany, Hitler was more distressed by the loss of cultural treasures than by the leveling of homes. Remarkably, his propagandists broadcast this fact, convinced that it would reveal not his callousness but his sensitivity: the destruction had failed to crush his artist's spirit. It is impossible to begin to make sense of this thinking without understanding what Wolf Lepenies calls The Seduction of Culture in German History.

This fascinating and unusual book tells the story of an arguably catastrophic German habit--that of valuing cultural achievement above all else and envisioning it as a noble substitute for politics. Lepenies examines how this tendency has affected German history from the late eighteenth century to today. He argues that the German preference for art over politics is essential to understanding the peculiar nature of Nazism, including its aesthetic appeal to many Germans (and others) and the fact that Hitler and many in his circle were failed artists and intellectuals who seem to have practiced their politics as a substitute form of art.

In a series of historical, intellectual, literary, and artistic vignettes told in an essayistic style full of compelling aphorisms, this wide-ranging book pays special attention to Goethe and Thomas Mann, and also contains brilliant discussions of such diverse figures as Novalis, Walt Whitman, Leo Strauss, and Allan Bloom. The Seduction of Culture in German History is concerned not only with Germany, but with how the German obsession with culture, sense of cultural superiority, and scorn of politics have affected its relations with other countries, France and the United States in particular.

About the Author

Wolf Lepenies is one of Germany's foremost intellectuals. He served as Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg, the German Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (1986-2001), where he is now a Permanent Fellow. Lepenies is also Professor of Sociology at the Free University in Berlin, and he spent several years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of numerous books and writes regularly for the German national newspaper Die Welt.

Table of Contents

Introduction Bombs over Dresden and the Rosenkavalier in the Skies 1

Chapter 1: Culture: A Noble Substitute 9Lessons in Diminished Particularity 9A Strange Indifference to Politics 11The German Spirit and the German Reich 16

Chapter 2: From the Republic into Exile 27Reflections of a Political Thomas Mann 27The Aesthetic Appeal of Fascism 36Art and Morality 45The Blurring of Exile and Emigration 48

Chapter 3: Novalis and Walt Whitman: German Romanticism and American Democracy 56A Country without an Opera 56Joseph in America 60German Democratic Vistas 63Emerson's Sponsors: Beethoven and Bettina 70

Chapter 4: German Culture Abroad: Victorious in Defeat 76The Closing of the American Mind 76The German Mind in Jeopardy 85A Calm Good-Bye to Europe 88

Chapter 6: German Culture at Home: A Moral Failure Turned to Intellectual Advantage 128The German Catastrophe 128The Resurrection of Culture 134Inner Emigration and Its Discontents 138German and Jewish Diaspora 145

Chapter 7: The Survival of the Typical German: Faust versus Mephistopheles 154Goethe in the Polls 154Goethe after 1945 159

Chapter 8: German Reunification: The Failure of the Interpreting Class 165Cultural Guardians 165Intellectual Disaster in the East 167Intellectual Tragicomedy 170

Chapter 9: Culture as Camouflage: The End of Central Europe 176Europe: Dream and Bureaucracy 176A Victory of Culture over Power 178

Chapter 10: Irony and Politics: Cultural Patriotism in Europe and the United States 186An American Patriot from Europe 186Hamlet and Fortinbras 190European Pygmies and the American Giant 195The Irony of American History 196

Chapter 11: Germany after Reunification: In Search of a Moral Masterpiece 200Culture and Realpolitik 200Solving Political Problems in the Field of Culture 203